Facebook has purged tens of thousands of fake accounts from its platform as part of an ongoing bid to dismantle a sophisticated global spam operation.

The worldwide crackdown on “inauthentic likes and comments” was launched on Friday, and Facebook’s security team confirmed the step on Saturday in an official blog post attributed to Shabnam Shaik, a technical programme manager, which said the platform had been working to disrupt a single network for six months.

Accounts appearing to be operated by users in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and “a number of other countries” that liked and commented on publishers’ pages were found to be “part of the same coordinated operation,” Shaik wrote.

Meanwhile, India Today has reported at least 900,000 fake accounts from Bangladesh were suspended by Facebook in the last three days, without citing any source.

According to the India Today report, a source from the government said at least 30 million Facebook users are active in the country, and the government found that at least 3% of these accounts are fake. The government filed complaints against the fake Facebook accounts and asked the social media giant to act on it.

In the official statement, Facebook said they are shutting down fake accounts due to security concerns and claimed that Bangladesh tops the list of countries that have a maximum number of fake accounts.

Fake accounts are widely used to create and spread spam on Facebook, which is one of the reasons for the platform’s real-name policy.

Seeing a rise in the number of genuine accounts being shut down as part of this scrutiny, Facebook said people can get their accounts up and running after a verification process.